NewEgg now offers free Windows 7 coupons with certain Vista license purchases.

The cost now? $109.99. With free shipping. This is something that wasn’t available last week, but now it is.

This is $90 less than buying Windows 7 Home Premium which starts at $200.

You wanted a better price? You got it.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

The perks of Opera have pretty much always been the same.

• Best native tab management
• Lightning fast operation in just about every way
• Low memory usage
• A user interface that just makes sense
• More options that are actually usable

I’d dare to say that other browsers "borrow" features from Opera routinely. The Opera browser always seems to come up with something really cool but people really don’t take notice of it. Then after a while, a competing browser will introduce a very similar feature and be lauded as if they invented it.

An example of this is the zoom feature. Opera was the first browser I can remember that got zoom right the first time. Firefox didn’t get that right until version 3 and IE not until 7, both several years after Opera more or less perfected it.

The only thing about Opera that was obvious is that it looked old. The current Opera 9.64 does look a bit antiquated while IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome look snazzy and modern.

Opera 10 on the other hand finally gets a freshened interface. It’s nothing particularly groundbreaking, but considering how often we all use our web browsers, this is a welcome sight to see. There is no part of this browser that says "old" anymore.

Concerning the address bar…

The AwesomeBar in Firefox sucks. Even in FF 3.5 it’s still a drag to use. You will realize why once you use Opera’s address bar. Why? Because Opera never "thinks" when trying to pull up information. The moment you start typing, wham, instant search of your bookmarks with no "thinking". It is nothing short of amazing how fast it is (even on slow PCs!)

Concerning better web integration…

From the Opera 10 page:

If you use a Web mail service as your default mail client, you can tell Opera 10 to do the same. Clicking on e-mail addresses or "Send by Mail" in Opera will open the compose page from your Web mail service provider. The same is true with the Feed reader — you can now also add any RSS/atom feed into your favorite online feed reader from within Opera 10.

This is actually really cool. But unfortunately the selections available do not include what most people use.

For example, when you click on an email address on a web page, this is what happens:

Okay, cool, I can choose a webmail service of my choice, let’s see what choices I have.

That’s it? No Hotmail? No Yahoo Mail? No Gmail? I’m hoping those services will be added in when this browser is out of beta.

Concerning the other stuff…

Opera Turbo

The Opera Turbo feature is an accelerator of sorts that is supposed to increase the speed of browsing when on a slow or choked (i.e. a slow public wi-fi) network. It is enabled by clicking the clock icon at the lower left of the browser. I can’t use it because my network is too fast (oh, darn it all). You can read more about Turbo here.

Resizable search field

At top right next to the address bar you can search Google (just like in Firefox or IE) and now you can adjust the size of it, but I bet you didn’t know that IE and FF can do the exact same thing. Opera makes it easy to spot. The other guys do that hiding-in-plain-sight thing.

Auto-update

Summed up: It’s about time Opera got this.

Would I recommend Opera now?

Opera 10 is the first version of this browser that I would actually recommend. As good as 9 and all the previous versions were, I just couldn’t recommend those. And the main reason for that is sub-par web standards support.

Version 10 on the other hand does have proper web standard support (believe me, that’s important). And as soon as the loose ends are tied up from the beta to the final release, I think this will finally be the one that will get Opera more new users.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

I’m not going to pretend for a moment that there’s more than a few of you out there running Windows XP illegally. You’ve seen the very nice $50 price tag of Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade and said, "Okay, I can afford that, but can I upgrade a pirated copy of XP to Win 7?"

Answer: No. When you hit the WGA, the upgrade won’t work.

However.. I can tell you how to get Windows 7 for significantly less than the full-version $200 price tag.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Buy a copy of Windows Vista Home Basic "System Builders" Edition from NewEgg. Cost is $84.99 with free shipping. This is a qualifying product for the Windows 7 Upgrade.
2. Pre-order your Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade for $49.99. Remember, this price only lasts until July 11, 2009. After that it’s $119 for the upgrade and $200 for the full version.

Your total cost will be $134.98. Shipping will be free on both products. This is significantly cheaper than the full $200 price tag for the full-version Win 7 price. Granted, you’ll never use the license of Windows Vista you purchased, but it does take $65 off what you would have spent for the full-version Win 7 otherwise. This is an easy, and moreover legal, way to save cash on the purchase of the OS.

Why go legal with Windows?

There’s really only one reason. It’s for Windows Update.

Windows Update started with Windows 98 which was over 10 years ago, however the Windows Genuine Advantage validation check didn’t occur until 2006.

If you are running Windows illegally, you basically can’t use WU at all and that’s a problem. Whenever critical updates are sent thru the WU system, you won’t be able to install it. Not easily, anyway.

The common comeback to that is, "Well, I don’t have to use WU. I could install the patches manually." Yes, you could. But you know full well that’s decidedly inconvenient and a pain to get done.

If you don’t feel like paying for Windows, just use Linux. But if you do use Windows, the one-time license cost is worth the price for the updates.

Most people take WU for granted, but it is vital to make sure critical updates are applied without any hassle.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Instead of getting into the super-techy details on this I’m going to concentrate on what most would care about.

Will 3.5 break add-ons?

Unfortunately yes, and a lot of them. This has been widely reported to be true, and it even broke a few of the ones I use so you can count me in as well. When I say "broke" it means "incompatible with 3.5".

Fortunately the 3.5 installer will tell you which will break before actually installing the software. So if from what you see there are add-ons you can’t live without, wait a bit before upgrading. Run the installer again in a week, have it check your plugins, and once everything checks out, then go for the install.

Is the Private Browsing feature any good?

Yes, but unfortunately it’s not very user-friendly. In all other browsers that have this feature you know you’re using it. IE 8 has a blue "InPrivate" notice in the address bar. Chrome has the detective-with-hat graphic. Firefox has nothing other than a notice in the title bar that says (Private Browsing). This is far too easy to dismiss once you leave the initial notice page. There should be something more obvious, such as a different-colored address bar, a graphic.. something.

The way in which it works is not exactly intuitive either.

Here’s the deal:

Let’s say you have three tabs open. This is very typical for Firefox users because they use multiple tabs often. You want to open a Private Browsing session, so you click Tools/Start Private Browsing. You get the notice you’re going Private, so you click OK.

*Poof*, the tabs you had open are gone. Not cool. Did they disappear? No. You can get them back by stopping the Private session via Tools/Stop Private Browsing and ta-da, then they return.

A Private session should always, repeat, always launch a new window so you don’t lose the tabs you currently have open.

If you’re saying, "Couldn’t a private session be opened as, say, a private tab with color indicating it’s a private session?" I wish. That would be a super-cool feature. But it doesn’t exist as it would require two independent sessions operating within the same browser window. This is not outside the realm of possibility as Google Chrome does technically do that sorta/kinda with separate processes for the way it does tabs, but even it launches a separate window at present for the way it does private browsing. Tabs which can be separated as private or public is nothing but pipe dream territory at this point.

Is the TraceMonkey engine any good?

TraceMonkey is the new JavaScript rendering engine in Firefox. If you use any kind of web-based email you will immediately notice a speed increase as all webmail sites use heavy scripting.

I tested this with a few site I know to be script-heavy and yes I did notice it was faster on load. I’m not going to say it was a night-and-day difference, but it was noticeable. As far as I’m concerned, any speed increase is a good one.

Did any web sites I normally use break?

Not a one. Firefox isn’t like IE where on any major version change stuff breaks on certain web sites. In fact I’ve never known FF to be like that. Quite the opposite, actually.

The deal-maker or deal-breaker is add-on compatibility

If you’re a Firefox user, this above all else will determine whether you use it or not. I personally went ahead and did it and switch to IE 8 for the stuff that broke in FF 3.5 (such as the LogMeIn add-on), so it’s not a big deal for me. Developers will also be playing catch-up in short order in the next coming weeks, so the broken add-ons will be fixed in due time.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

The players compared are Winamp, MediaMonkey, iTunes and Windows Media Player, all of which are widely used. Features/functions compared are:

• File type support
• Searching/Filtering and Playlists
• Tagging
• Interface speed
• Bloatware analysis
• Library maintenance
• Extras
• Miscellaneous issues

After all is said and done, the author ranks the players in the following order: MediaMonkey, Winamp (close 2nd), Windows Media Player and iTunes. Of course, this is subjective but it still gives you a good overview of the systems are not using.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

You can think of Miro as a Tivo for Internet TV as you can save shows from their guide and when new shows are available, they are automatically downloaded to your system. Additionally, Miro has a built in BitTorrent client so you can get new content through peer-to-peer networking.

To me, at first glance, this is a great program as you can almost instantly build a video library of shows you like. If anyone has been using Miro for some time, please post your thoughts with it.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Is Windows 7 cheaper than Vista? YES (thank God). If Microsoft had priced this the same as the previous OS that would have been a seriously stupid maneuver.

Starting today, if you pre-order Windows 7 as an upgrade, the Home Premium Edition (which is what most people would go for) is just a tick under $50. See below.

The full versions start with Home Premium at $199.99. That’s still steep, but it is cheaper than Vista. See below.

What do you not get with Home Premium?

• XP Mode
• Domain Join feature
• Automatic backup
• BitLocker
• Thirty-five language choices

The only one you’d miss is the auto-backup feature, but there are several auto-backup solutions out there to cover that.

See a detailed comparison chart here.

What versions of Windows qualify you for the upgrade?

Windows Vista or Windows XP. Yes, XP qualifies be it Home or Pro Edition. Is says so right on the Office Depot sale page for this product.

A near-60% discount on the purchase of Home Premium means this is the cheapest Windows upgrade we’ve seen in a very long time.

I use Windows 7 RC on a daily basis. It’s stable and solid. And now, thankfully, cheap (at least for the upgrade).

This upgrade offer lasts from today, June 26 to July 11.

Where to get it?

• Amazon
• Office Depot
• Microsoft Store

The links go directly to the Windows 7 pre-order page for the respective vendor.

[UPDATE]

Several more vendors are now available including TigerDirect, BestBuy, NewEgg and more.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for “BOMArchiveHelper.app”, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder.

Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more or less obscure formats.

The Unarchiver is a free download and supports just about every common compression format.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

First of all, I used to use Outlook. And I’m not talking about Outlook Express here, I mean the full version of Outlook. The client was good but there were certain things about the software that really rubbed me the wrong way.

I couldn’t stand the "heavy" nature of it. Outlook has always been a beast. Yes, I know it has a ton of functionality to it (which is a huge perk), but the tradeoff is that the software is huge not only in size but also in what it eats up for memory.

It’s a target. The only time I ever, and I mean ever, got viruses from emails that actually infected my computer was from Outlook. Being it’s so widely used it is a huge target for getting your computer infected. In an enterprise environment this isn’t really a problem since there’s an I.T. staff ready to take care of problems like that, should they occur. But for the home user, you really have to make sure you’ve got some better-than-average protection specifically for your email when using Outlook.

The Word rendering engine. This is a huge bone of contention with a ton of people and the primary focus for the article linked above. I also hated this because that engine never rendered HTML emails correctly. And for Outlook 2010 it’s probably not going to change.

The reason the Word engine is bad is because it’s the "Microsoft Way" of viewing email which does not follow web standards. And yes, this has to change. Email should be rendered in the client in such a way where it follows standards like everybody else does it.

Do you use Outlook now? Is there stuff about it you can’t stand?

(I’m particularly interested in I.T. guys out there who have to support this thing on an enterprise level.)

Let us know by posting a comment.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

I have written several endorsements for the use of GNU Cash, but if that is not your cup of tea then this article on Consumer Reports site may help. It offers several suggestions which you might want to try. Of course, Quicken is by far the most popular of the alternatives and they are offering a discount to Microsoft Money users.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.